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To cant think of a way yo capture everything from a php/server side point of view, as things like images/scripts/etc might not even access the server your script it running on.

If you plan to capture everything it is probably better to do it from a client side point of view, and do it from the computer that is making a request.

One possibly would be to write a php script, and use it as a proxy and send HTTP REQUESTS from it. then all the RESPONSES will goto the script, which you would then process and send back to the user. But it would be greatly difficult writing a script which emulates a browser, and you would still have troubles with flash or java

I need to determine the validity of all page elements. So if there are any images, video files, etc, being displayed on the page, I would need to get a list of them all so that I can check them. All of this will be done on external sites and has to be performed by script.

Is it possible to send request headers that ask for the return of something other than what it was sent to? For example, sending request headers to www.google.com and expecting the response headers from the google logo?

In order to get a response, you have to send a request. When you send a requeset for a page, you get only the response of a page, not what is linked in form of html, javascript, flash, etc. To get a response for every page element that is subject to, you have to make a different request for each and every one of them (mimic browser). And to do that, you have to parse the document.

It is rather easy to parse html, to find the requests for images, js, css includes, etc. However, when it comes to javascript (ajax), flash, java applets and similar, it is in a range of very difficult to completely impossible.

You can implement a parser for ajax requests (well who knows, maybe), but I think that's about your limit. Flash runs on its own engine on client machine, you will not mimic flash as it's not even open source. I won't even start about java applets; and the list goes on.

The conclusion here is that html is the only realistic level you can work on. Let's face it, you're doing nothing but a search engine spider. Did you hear of a search engine that indexed ajax or flash? Neither did I.